Case Study

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Alternative Solutions to Prove Lawful Source of Funds

An I-526 investor runs a very successful E-Commerce business in China, which generated 11 million RMB in revenue and 4 million RMB in profit in 2014. The business has a very high level of inventory turnover, and handles thousands of small online orders on a daily basis. However, as an E-Commerce store, our investor did not have any formal business registration document. Nor did he have any accounting procedures in place to clearly demonstrate his company’s profitability.

Our investor team worked tirelessly with the investor to find alternative solutions to prove his lawful source of funds. To help USCIS understand the legality of the business model, we used many outside sources and provided USCIS with a detailed explanation of the intricacies surrounding running an E-commerce store in China, including its registration process and taxation requirements.

Because the company’s profitability relied on thousands of transactions every day, we knew we had to be creative to document the company’s revenue stream. We submitted pertinent documents showing the process of one online order from start to finish in each of the prior years to show the normal operation of the business.

We then compared the popularity of the investor’s business to the most popular stores on eBay based on store ratings. Using growth of the order counts and sales revenue, we demonstrated that the business was growing rapidly. More importantly, we dissected the raw data on the costs and sales of the flagship products carried by the store, and presented a comprehensive analysis on the profitability of the business.